Stella Kenelm, Mayor of Boll

I was waiting for Myrtle outside the Boll Road Sheltered housing unit, poking at a bit of loose plastic which kept popping up on the dashboard when I noticed my old apartment block neighbour, Mrs Rorshach, glaring at me out of Doris’s old bedroom window.

‘Don’t encourage that tedious old witch,’ instructed Myrtle, as she landed rather heavily into the passenger seat. ‘I had to have a shower at the Fire Station this morning because she ran off all the hot water in the building trying to flush an imaginary spider out of her shower tray.’

 

 

I nodded sympathetically, but I was fully occupied trying to find 359 Harbour Road, Boll, in my spiral bound street gazetteer of Ballina.

This was the address of our portacabin neighbour Clinton. After struggling to control the hound at work, Bill had been experimenting with leaving FluffyMcD at home during the day, but complaints about noise had flooded in from the neighbours, so we had offered to visit the poor dog to give him some company, and a break from being locked inside.

We had reached the centre of Boll, and I was trying to work out the next move before the lights changed, but I couldn’t concentrate because Myrtle was still muttering on about Mrs Rorschach, so I interrupted her by bashing hard on the dashboard with my road map.

 This had the additional effect of snapping off the rogue loose plastic piece from the dashboard. However, now the car’s hazard warning lights were flashing on and off, and we had to park up in front of Blinky Sloane’s Discount Opticians to stick a bit of one of Myrtle’s toffee’s into the hole left by the broken trim to fix the problem.

I decided that I wasn’t in a good mood.

Fluffy McD was waiting in the bungalow’s front room window. He had already clawed down the curtains, and our arrival excited him further. I began to think that the double glazing would give way before we managed to get the door open.

‘He doesn’t like being left on his own,’ said Myrtle, stating the obvious. The lounge door had sustained deep grooves where the poor hound had tried to escape.

We made a huge fuss of the beast, and he responded with a body whirling, tail wagging dance.
‘I wish I could take you home, yes I do,’ my friend pulled a coochy coo face and was rewarded by having her face coated in dog saliva.

‘I don’t know why Clinton bought a pet if he doesn’t have time to look after him, ' I objected,’ opening the fridge, and sliding a plate of salmon odds and ends into a pet bowl.
‘He didn’t buy FluffyMcD,’ my friend replied, ‘ Clinton found the dog chained up when he took over the lease for the breaker’s yard on the industrial estate.’
‘How could anyone abandon an animal like that?’ I said angrily, trying to put the bowl on the floor through a barrier of swirling dog.

FMcD didn’t so much eat the snack, as run at it with so much momentum that it was absorbed internally as he passed through it.

‘Ugh, salmon,’ Myrtle pulled a face, ‘it isn’t the taste, it’s the price.’
I looked at her , but not encouragingly.

‘Cost me four thousand dollars, all my savings, stupid Fairbanks was at the bottom of it, but he got away with it like he always does.’

My attention shifted to this surprising information. ‘What are you on about now?’

‘That salmon farm nonsense, I told you about it before,’.

‘No you didn’t..’

‘I did, it was when I was living up in Bachrein, with Lowell. This big scheme, american backers, couldn’t fail, fresh mountain salmon, they dug a huge hole in a mountainside, then the so called company director vanished with all the funds, and I was left chasing after nothing. I’d invested all my money. How do you think I ended up living in the Sheltered Housing?’

I shook my head.

‘It was an offer I couldn’t refuse,’ that’s what they call it when you poke about somewhere you shouldn’t for too long. I didn’t have the state of mind to fight back anymore, and it was all finished with Lowell. I had nowhere else to go.’

I shook my head again, some days new facts just get filed away in an overflowing part of my brain to be dealt with later.

 

A walk on the beach had been refreshing, if a little stressful at times, FMcD is very fussy about strange people, or animals, who get in his way, or look like they might get in the way, or who might be flying overhead, making remarks in gull language which contradicted his world view.
He also had contentious opinions about the best location for discarded ice-cream wrappers. We believed that these were better left in the litter bins that lined the beach side path, FMcD disagreed, sometimes extremely vocally and fighting with all his strength at the end of the extendable lead. My ears were ringing by the time we returned to Clinton’s home.

 

 

Once back at the bungalow, things settled down at last, and we were able to relax in the delightful back garden. At least, the parts of the plot which hadn’t been subjected to McD’s recent mining activity were still delightful.

A sea breeze wafted through the loose fencing, and the weather was unusually hot for February.
The dog had finally dozed off on a warm patch of patio slabs which had caught the low sun. Myrtle was stretched out on a sun lounger, wrapped up in her coat, scarf and hat, and reading a lurid medical romance she had borrowed from Alice. That is, she had the book propped up by her side and occasionally glanced at a page between longer patches of closing her eyes and snoring. Though this can’t be regarded as sleeping, because she never does that in an afternoon, apparently.

I was much more agitated and sitting bolt upright on a dining chair at the garden table, working out my financial budget for the following month. 

If it hadn’t been for Clinton filling up my car with the truck diesel he’d recovered from the fuel tanks of wrecks, I would be reduced to sneaking into Myrtle’s sheltered housing dining room again, to tolerate those bright green peas that the centre manager, Evadne Blackheart, buys in huge cans from a catering wholesaler on the ring road.

 As it was, my calculations still kept ending with displeasing minus signs around the third week.
I was uncomfortably aware that it was mainly my legal representative who was benefiting from my penny pinching, and the insurance appeal was, frustratingly, still getting nowhere.

 I tried to work out at what point I would have paid more in profesional fees than I had any chance of getting back in compensation, but the wind kept blowing the pages of my notebook over, and I gave up in frustration.
 

A group of boys were playing on the beach with some sort of flying toys that looked like mini drones. Their happy laughter distracted me for a while, until I heard the unwelcome loud conversation of an approaching couple of beach walkers. 

‘I’ve read your book ‘Tightening The Belt’ ten times now,’ an eager young voice rang out ‘it is such a thrill to actually meet you in person Dr Green!’

An older man replied with unconvincing modesty, 'Just glad if it could be of some use.’

‘You inspired me to go into politics,’ the keen fan continued.

‘Of course I am here in Ballina on a family matter, but I am always glad to spread the word about frugal financial management, especially to those eager to learn.’ 

‘What are the Mayor of Boll and Magnasanti’s chief financial advisor having a cosy chat about now?’ Myrtle had popped up behind me like a stealthy galleon. We both sneaked closer to the fence.
She crouched under a juniper bush and I continued to hide behind an unused laundry whirligig. 

Whatever wisdom Green was planning to impart was never to be heard though, as he suddenly started yelping, and hitting at his own face as if stung by bees.

‘It’s doing it by itself, the controls aren’t working any more,’ a panicked child’s voice floated up the beach. Soon a small crowd of boys surrounded the political pair, trying to stop their drones pelting Mortimer Green.

The situation had finally caught the attention of our lazily relaxing hound. He stared for a moment, through a gap in the fence, then leapt completely over it from a standing start, nipping one of the flying toys out of the air as he landed neatly on the other side.
Presently the sand was littered with crunched up electronics and crying boys trying to retrieve their gadgets.

Once FMcD had established that the drones were inedible, he lost interest, and shot off down the beach to investigate the intriguing patch of rotting seaweed and decomposing jellyfish that he’d remembered from our walk earlier, and I ended up screaming ‘come back Fluffy’ over the fence until my throat was sore.

 

It took us half an hour to capture the dog, but we could not persuade him to enter the hated front room, so we left him to roam free in the bungalow. 

‘Bill will have no furniture left by the time he gets home,’ commented Myrtle dryly, and some mean part of me hoped it would be true.

 

Later that evening, while I was experimenting once again with adjusting the air mattress, it occurred to me that Mortimer Green, when seen in real life, rather than his obviously touched up press shots, seemed oddly familiar. It wasn’t a resemblance to Neil Fairbanks, who must have taken after his mother, and had to be admitted, was quite handsome, if in an oily way.

Roy Fairbanks, the younger child, had the same stocky build as his father, but again that wasn’t what was eating at the edge of my consciousness.

The realisation finally came to me in the middle of the night, while fighting to switch off Fur Elise, belting out from the toilet roll holder in our small portacabin bathroom.

Gnomes!!! Those ugly faced gnomes could have been moulded from a full body cast of Green, and their faces, if I took away the mispainted stoniness, were an exact match.
What could this mean?